Kavita Patel

Former director of policy for the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs

Kavita Patel is a health policy specialist and board-certified physician whose expertise centers on issues such as delivery system reform, access, coverage and quality.

Dr. Patel is a fellow and managing director of delivery system reform and clinical transformation at the Brookings Institution’s Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform. She is also an advisor to the Aspen Institute.

She previously served as director of policy for the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, where she applied her clinical experience to shaping U.S. health policy and provided clinical teams, medical providers and policy-makers with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively respond to the challenges of the U.S. health care system.

Prior to her role with the Obama administration, Dr. Patel was deputy staff director for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee under the leadership of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

More recently, Dr. Patel was director of the health policy program at New America Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan public policy institute.

Dr. Patel was a clinical instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine and an associate scientist at the RAND Corporation. She completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA, where she also received a master’s degree in public health with a concentration on health economics. She received her medical training at the University of Texas Health Science Center and Oregon Health and Sciences University, where she served as a chief resident in internal medicine.